1121 6 1
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I would like to go back (with spade, pick, soft bristles), and sift through time and layers, brush away the intervening years, and find: the tooth, knocked out by my then best friend, when we were seven, careening downhill in my father's wheelbarrow on Boscobel…
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125011
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I ran into Geary Marston in front of the French Hotel Café, across the street from Chez Panisse. I was sitting outside at a small round metal table. A girl that looked like a Degas model was selling flowers on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Her shor
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119300
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“They’re not gonna shoot him?” Rick cried.
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31812816
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He looked at the receiver in his hand as it hummed its dead-line song. His hand shook. Shit, he thought.
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95720
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Clatters and clatters ensued, and the splash destroyed all denial.
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1966106
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If you could look out to either side of you, you'd see the signs. Restricted Area, Danger Keep Out.
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111562
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I bought the goldfish at different pet shops out of town, a few at a time, until I had two hundred or more in the freezer.
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106520
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Christmas Muzak was piped through to every store in the shopping mall. Giant red velvet bows adorned reproduction Victorian gaslights. Yards of glittered cotton pretended to be snow. A Santa rang a brass bell.
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110670
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On the way to the drinking fountain, Elysia Martin, a third grader at St. Michael's Parochial School, heard a voice calling her name. When she turned toward the white plaster statue of the Virgin Mary that sat between twin hedges in the rose garden, she
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152072
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He had long since quit listening to the incessant clanging of the bell. He stood, ringing the bell, squinting into the setting sun, nauseous from the car exhaust, his body aching for alcohol.
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142221
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The punk boys are my favorite. They come with an attitude, the piercings and the chains and the baggy pants with their underwear hanging out. I’m a punk myself, I tell them. The long white hair and beard? They’re real, my friend.
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122711
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My wife and I were sitting at the bar at Brennan’s down on 4th Street one night, drinking too much without eating. Geary had convinced us to come down there with him, for two reasons. One, to give us the lowdown on where to stay and what to do in New Yo
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4543915
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Margaret and I are going to Chicago. Everything we do this morning feels final, as if we are doing it for the last time, which is probably true.
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21342913
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My round belly is deflating. I disappear a little more by the day. It's been weeks. Soon, I may not even be here.
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108730
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Naked American Apparel models romp with elk and antelope, and the Ghost of Richard Nixon directs traffic with the grace of a Wounded Hyena.
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118151
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Two weeks after the shadow shows up in Stephen's x-ray, you decide to do something about the bucket in the garden. You start by wedging it underneath the faucet in the back yard so tightly that it pushes against the pipe with the groan of grinding metal. Now the hose is…
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126032
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Matthias Fenstermacher loved onions, but hated slicing them, and so he labored to produce a tearless variety. His first attempt was indeed tearless--instead of weeping, the slicer was overcome by fits of uncontrollable giggles. The potential hazard was
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1907173
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When you push my bra down, so it rests uncomfortably beneath my breasts—your teeth dragging pink trails across my throat and shoulders, pushing your thumb and forefinger into my panties—you don't say that you love me. You say, “Jesus shit. Relax, baby,…
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99120
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Time stole you from underneath the goldendock. Writhing there, slick as a flapping tongue;lips gored, red, whose gaping could embolden weak hands behind the blazing buck blade, long ago pierced in your summer quietus, beneath the soft shade of a tackle box, as the…
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124511
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I read the runes, the cards, the signs, the sticks. I consulted tarot cards and read tea leaves. I listened to you, deconstructed every word and look and tone with the harshest logic and cynicism I could muster. If there was some way to decipher what you
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118950
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The dead horse on CNN
was floating there
in the floodwater
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137520
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1. People avoided Mac, the Great White Hunter, which was how he liked to think of himself, even though he was not white. Mac was cocoa colored and stalked his prey nearly nude. The city was his…
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45041
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“I’ve decided to make some money by filming some of it, making a film and titling it The Nascar 500. It’s a great money maker and here's the gimmick: instead of the usual porn soundtrack it would be the sounds of stock cars racing around the track.
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4775327
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Sometime in the 60s a philosophy teacher named William H. Gass was writing a novel. He had it about where he wanted it when someone stole the manuscript from his car.
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1249123
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I'm explicating Emily Dickinson when the alarm starts: three long, two short. Lockdown mode. Only there was nothing in the staff bulletin about a drill. So I tell the students to get down on the floor, away from the window. I open the classroom door and lock it from…
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114262
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We cannot cross the river until it freezes. Bekker predicts January. For food we gather leaves, berries and roots from the thick forest behind the cabin. Suarez boils what we find into a revolting paste that we spoon into our mouths with dirty fingers.
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105700
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That was the summer that Christine Nelson owned me.
It felt like catching the flu. I had it bad. I was about to turn seven, and it was my first time, and it was bad. A love like that, I don’t know, it’s not a love supreme. It wasn’t completely cru
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181143
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If I play my accordion too loudly while you're painting, you complain. You stamp about in your room under mine. You fetch the broom from the closet and use it to thump vehemently on the ceiling. I feel the vibrations through my feet.
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149755
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Called in sick at work for a week straight when I first met Tony.
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96620
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She had the smile of a pixie on mushrooms in a disco ball universe, and I dug her style.
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